The Hermitage Book Club: Discussing Hermitage Fellow Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 Novel MARTYR!

Cyrus Shams, the newly sober Iranian American poet at the heart of Martyr!, lost his mother when a U.S. Navy warship shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. His father spent his American years killing chickens on a Midwestern factory farm. Cyrus's obsession with martyrdom leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. The novel, Hermitage Fellow Kaveh Akbar's 2024 debut and a National Book Award finalist, is the book for this session of the Hermitage Book Club. The monthly discussion is led by programs director Tiffany Colli-Moon and is one of two series the Hermitage started this fall at its newly acquired Englewood Art Center. Readers are asked to finish the novel beforehand.